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Tim Tebow, Man of Millions

Because you have to believe. Part of a four-part attempt to understand the leader of Christian Nation and the quarterback of our time, on the occasion of his taking on his diametric opposite and losing pretty badly.

Over the last week, a few secular writers who felt left behind by Tebowmania felt compelled to try claiming him for secular purposes rather than religious ones. One doesn't have to believe that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior to appreciate what Tim Tebow is doing out in Denver, went the argument; the winning streak he's inspired with his fourth-quarter feats of derring-do have more to do with the generalities of his "optimism" and "power of positive thinking" than they do with the specifics of his faith, and even atheists can't fail to cheer the triumph of Tebow's intangibles in an age of ruthlessly technocratic assessment.

Pshaw, as the oldsters used to say.

Tebow's story is a religious one, and everybody knows it. Take away the element of religion and his win streak over mostly terrible teams in mostly "defensive struggles" is reminiscent of Vince Young's rookie year with the Titans — back then, you also heard plenty about Young "finding a way to win" despite the unorthodoxies of his throwing style. What you didn't hear, though, was that he was winning to give glory to God, and so his wins or losses weren't national news, and when the law of averages finally caught up with him, as they always do in the NFL, he lost his aura (not to mention his shit) and the iron law of playing quarterback professionally remained intact:

If you can't complete 60 percent of your passes all over the field, you can't play.

Now, Tim Tebow does not — and, for now, cannot — complete 60 percent of his passes. He's strong, so he can shot-put and corkscrew the ball all over the field, but he often looks like he's throwing the ball away when he's not, and he avoids interceptions by coming nowhere near his intended receiver. It would be tempting to say that none of this matters to the legions he has inspired, but of course it's all that matters: Because Tim Tebow is a religious figure rather than an athletic one, the limitations of his talent wind up testifying to the potency of his faith. The fact that he'll be almost comically inept for three quarters and then catch an updraft of mastery in the fourth serves to demonstrate not that he's a winner but that Jesus is — and, above all, that Christianity works.

And this is where Tebowmania serves to reveal America's deepest anxiety about its national religion: that it doesn't.

You see, of all the major religions, Christianity makes the largest claim; it does not merely promise paradise down the line, but also in the here-and-now. Through the writings of Saul of Tarsus, it promises nothing less than temporal transformation — believe in this, and you will become an entirely different person. You will be made made clean, made whole, and above all, made new; Saul the persecutor will become St. Paul, the persecuted. It's easy to see why such a faith would become the de facto gospel of the New World, and even why it might remain so in the face of science, reason and plain common sense. By making a claim of efficacy, Christianity makes a claim that is either demonstrable, or not. This is why it is so congenial to capitalism, conspicuous consumption, the gospel of success, and America's self-help ethos; and this is why it is so important to the country that Tim Tebow be transformed from a raw and developing talent with some permanent liabilities to, well, a winner. The most powerful argument that Christians can make for their faith is that it works: I once was lost and now I'm found. The most powerful argument that nonbelievers can make against it is that doesn't: The persecutor is almost never willingly transformed into the persecuted, for Jesus's sake or anyone else's... and Tim Tebow will never be a 60-percent passer in the National Football League.

Given the stakes — given that almost every American seemed to have a stake in the outcome — it was almost a disappointment that yesterday's football game between Tom Brady's New England Patriots and Tim Tebow's Denver Broncos resembled just that: a football game. Brady, of course, is styled as the anti-Tebow, and not only because of his limited mobility, ruthless efficiency, and unmatched fluency with the ball, but also because of his pride. A sixth-round draft choice who turned himself into one of the best quarterbacks in NFL history, he has his own tale of transformation, but he has always told it in terms of his own rigorous self-belief rather than in terms of his belief in supernatural forces. He is a man alone out there, while Tebow is a man of the millions, and for a while on Sunday it looked as though as the Lord of Hosts would hold sway: a team as a strong, tough, and unfinished as their leader, the Broncos took the first quarter by hitting hard and running over and through a Patriot team that seemed, for a few minutes, physically overmatched. Then Brady took over, and a team capable of multiple miracles of execution wound up running away from a team geared for the miracle finish in close, low-scoring games against mediocre competition.

The game ended, then, as most other NFL games do, with the more skilled, polished, and above all more professional team winning in a walk. That's not how any of the networks saw it, however; because the game was yet another of our culture's referendums on its national religion, they felt compelled to apologize for the outcome, and for Tebow's gutsy but uneven performance. ESPN devoted half of NFL Prime Time to the post-game press conferences, for God's sake, as if the game had been far more than a game, as if it had been a national event.

And so it was. "A lot of questions about Tim Tebow have been answered here today," intoned one of the announcers at the end of Sunday's game. But that's not true; and as long as the central questions of Tim Tebow's career are also questions about Tim Tebow's faith, his games will be national events. But one day they will be answered, and my guess is that they will be answered by the law of averages more than they will be by laws suspended in answer to Tim Tebow's prayers.

My guess is that that Tim Tebow's success rate in the NFL will always be erratic.

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